Agriculture began as a partnership between people and plants. Every plant we know as food was co-created, sometimes over a thousand years of growing seasons, by the equivalent of a backyard gardener in partnership with the plant. Someone started selecting the best teosinte seeds from that wild Mexican grass, planting and nurturing them with special care. By the time Europeans arrived in the New World, indigenous gardeners in partnership with teosinte had created 7,000 distinct varieties of corn, some of them adapted to thrive as far north as New York.

This is plant breeding. As William Tracy (dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison) pointed out at the Organic Seed Growers Conference in Port Townsend, Washington in late January, plant breeding is not a science but a technology. “Plant breeding is working with plants – the breeder selects, and the plant creates solutions.” It’s a process ideally suited to small ecological farmers and home growers, whose success depends on close observation and careful selection. Every discerning seed saver is a plant breeder, as long as they pay attention to two important conditions: the minimum population necessary to ensure the particular species’ genetic diversity, and sufficient isolation from related species that could cross-pollinate with undesirable results.

Where does our seed come from today? The exponential curve of seed industry consolidation is the same curve shown by wealth consolidation, or population growth, or ice cap melt, or any dozen other catastrophic global trends. It doesn’t seem so bad at first – a few seed companies buying smaller ones, and dropping seed varieties that are not big sellers – but pretty soon it’s chemical companies buying large seed companies and here we are, at the dizzy peak. Monsanto now controls 90 percent of all crop seed; Bayer and Dupont own most of the rest. As industrial monoculture spread, bioregionally adapted varieties were abandoned in favor of seeds dependent on petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides, the real profit-makers for the companies now in control of seeds. No wonder 96 percent of vegetable and grain seed varieties are no longer available to farmers and gardeners. Genetically engineered crops up the ante further by contaminating the DNA of whatever neighboring crops they cross-pollinate, a problem especially critical to wind-pollinated plants like corn, canola, and sugar beets.

Here’s why I find this scenario completely encouraging. Though things are utterly messed up in every direction, in many aspects of life it’s difficult to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Transportation for example – I often find it necessary to drive a car. I try to minimize my carbon footprint when I can, but that’s not enough and I know it, which is why there is so little satisfaction to be found there. Growing seeds of the foods we eat is not mitigation or damage management – it’s the solution, pure and simple. It’s something anyone with even a rooftop garden or a back yard can do with at least one crop. It’s satisfying on so many levels at once – better nutrition, better tasting food, better health, secure localized food system that is not dependent on oil, etc. — plus the deep joy that can be found in an ongoing creative relationship with nature.

Though many crop varieties are extinct, many more have been squirreled away in seed banks and on the cellar shelves of home gardeners. The up side of globalization is that seeds saved by gardeners and plant breeders are quickly finding their way around the world, where they can fill missing niches and add resilience as regional varieties are re-established. A handful of seed can be enough to rehabilitate a variety. According to Bill McDorman, also at the conference – who should know, with thirty years’ experience in service to bioregional seed systems – “We’re going to grow it back – I think we have enough.” There is enough genetic diversity in our remaining seed stocks that, in partnership with the plants, we can grow back a vibrant healthy cornucopia of future food. We can grow back a healthy world.

Another thing I like about our dire situation is that the solution only works on a community-wide or regional level – and it can work in every bioregion. It’s not global, and it’s not individual. Seed crops take up more space than other vegetables, and isolation distances require garden-planning coordination among neighbors. Growing seed is not a survivalist go-it-alone strategy — it’s the beginning of a more satisfying way of life. Every distinct bioregion on earth can reclaim and reinvent food plants that suit its particular soils and climate, and we can swap seeds with other regions as the climate continues to fluctuate.

Here in Mendocino County we have three particular advantages. One, we have a hard-won county ordinance that bans the cultivation of genetically modified plants. Two, we currently have no large agricultural tracts other than vineyards and orchards – this provides room to expand, say for grain production, and also gives us a break from the industrial-agriculture interests that can easily skew local priorities. Three, and I think this is the key, we have a rural population of expert gardeners scattered through the coast range – ideally isolated plots in a wide range of microclimates, perfect for growing food crops for seed, with knowledgeable organic growers already in residence. When I spoke at the garden club last week, community activist Jon Spitz spontaneously passed around a sign-up sheet for a Seed Growers Co-op, and we’re off and growing. Email me at our website if you want to join in for this summer’s growing season. Beginners and experienced seed savers equally welcome.
~~

You take away politics, take away whether you think trickle-down [economics] works, take away even what you think about race. Just look at this community. Are the families healthy and thriving? No? Okay. It's not resilient.

The agency's assessment of fracking fluid disclosure is part of its broader study on fracking and water—and spotlights the project's limitations.By Neela Banerjee Oil and gas companies refuse to disclose 10 percent of the hundreds of chemicals they use during hydraulic fracturing, according to a new analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. […]

Two scientists from Columbia University launch a $40,000 pilot testing project in Pennsylvania they hope will lead to full-scale research.By David Hasemyer Frank Varano knows what's coming. His land near Williamsport, Pa., abuts property that has been leased for gas exploration––and he's certain it will be fracked. What is less certain is how that […]

If a new rule takes effect, about 95 percent of all pipelines would be subject to stricter safety testing because of their age, location and other factors.By Elizabeth Douglass It's been two years since a broken 1940s ExxonMobil pipeline flooded an Arkansas neighborhood with Canada's heaviest oil, and the ripple effects of the spill have made it to […]

(Reuters)The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. The U.S. submission, on Monday or Tuesday according to a White House official, adds to national strategies beyond 2020 already p […]

On March 2, motivational speaker Bob Lenz gave a presentation at Iron Mountain High School in Michigan... which might have been okay until he used the opportunity to promote an event he was hosting at a local church later that evening. This is the flyer he gave to students:And how did that evening event go? Well, he boasted about his conversions-to-Jesus aft […]

Gordon Klingenschmitt, the fundamentalist Christian and Colorado lawmaker, is finally getting a sort of punishment following his comments last week that the brutal attack of a pregnant woman occurred because we allow legal abortions in this country.He has now been pulled from one of the two committees on which he served:

How many religious references do we need to see from public school officials before we can all admit they've overstepped their bounds?Exhibit 1: Principal Albert Hardison's message on the website for Walnut Hill Elementary/Middle School in Louisiana, part of the Caddo Parish Public Schools:

Small is beautiful, when small is skilled and dedicated. ~Gene Logsdon→

I've observed that people tend to live at one of two extremes in the spectrum of life: those who live on the edge, and those who avoid the edge. Those who live on the edge are hanging out in the most dangerous and unstable places — yet they're also often the most powerful agents of change, because the edge is where change is happening; away from the edge, things are naturally unchanging. ~Thom Hartmann

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. ~Noam Chomsky

Transition Tools (Basic)

Stoics/Freethought

Local Organic Family Farms

THE SMALL ORGANIC FARM greatly discomforts the corporate/ industrial mind because the small organic farm is one of the most relentlessly subversive forces on the planet. Over centuries both the communist and the capitalist systems have tried to destroy small farms because small farmers are a threat to the consolidation of absolute power.

Thomas Jefferson said he didn’t think we could have democracy unless at least 20% of the population was self-supporting on small farms so they were independent enough to be able to tell an oppressive government to stuff it.

It is very difficult to control people who can create products without purchasing inputs from the system, who can market their products directly thus avoiding the involvement of mercenary middlemen, who can butcher animals and preserve foods without reliance on industrial conglomerates, and who can’t be bullied because they can feed their own faces. ~Eliot Coleman